1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a document use managing system, a document processing system, a manipulation authority managing apparatus, a document managing apparatus, and a computer readable medium.
2. Related Art
To protect an electronic document from illegal use, a procedure is available that information that prescribes manipulation authority of a user or a user group (hereinafter referred to generically as a user) over the electronic document is generated in advance and the use of the electronic document is controlled according to that information. The information that prescribes manipulation authority is called access control information (or list), a security policy, or the like (hereinafter referred to generically as a security policy). Systems are known which intensively manage security policies with a server on a network. In systems of this kind, security policies are correlated with respective electronic documents. When a user requests a manipulation on an electronic document, whether to permit the user the manipulation is judged on the basis of the security policy corresponding to the electronic document.
Assume that in a system of the above kind a security policy (referred to as a first policy) that is correlated with a certain electronic document (referred to as a first document) gives a certain user a data copying right for the contents of the first document. In this case, the user can copy a portion of the first document into a second document which is protected by another security policy (referred to as a second policy). If this is done, that portion of the first document which has been copied into the second document is protected according to the second policy but may not be protected in the manner prescribed by the first policy.